i went to peaceful rest valley ONE TIME and now i have this mushroom growing out of my skull and my controls have been scrambled since 1998 and you just go and have this entire race of people who are appropriating my cultural heritage

...can I ask for some context without anybody changing their avatars, editing their last six months worth of posts, and leaving forever?

I mean, I get that it's a GamerGate joke and Zoe Quinn is (justifiably) unhappy about it. That is the extent of what I've been able to infer from the tweet and I am fairly confident that typing shit into a search engine to get more background is going to make my day much worse than just asking.

Thad wrote:I mean, I get that it's a GamerGate joke and Zoe Quinn is (justifiably) unhappy about it.

I'm not 100% sure on this, but I think it actually begins and ends there. Like, people are talking loudly online about it, as they have with anything GG, but there's nothing more to the story than the fact that some stupid Nintendo employee thought he would make a funny haha.

Thad wrote:I mean, I get that it's a GamerGate joke and Zoe Quinn is (justifiably) unhappy about it. That is the extent of what I've been able to infer from the tweet and I am fairly confident that typing shit into a search engine to get more background is going to make my day much worse than just asking.

That's basically it. Whether intentionally or not, Treehouse put those lines in the new Paper Mario, making light of a group that has actively sought to ruin lives and end careers. And this is after Nintendo fired Alison Rapp whilst she was trying to defend herself from GG.

The $gate section of the dialog is pretty heavily weighted towards Water, but I don't buy for even half a second that whoever specifically pointed out that there are 5 of the (fun) Guys meant anything other than a Gamergate double entendre.

Rico wrote:The $gate section of the dialog is pretty heavily weighted towards Water, but I don't buy for even half a second that whoever specifically pointed out that there are 5 of the (fun) Guys meant anything other than a Gamergate double entendre.

It's pretty much impossible that anyone on the localization team hasn't heard of Gamergate. There's still a possibility that it's coincidence; I'd be interested in what the Japanese dialogue was. (Japanese people DO seem to enjoy grouping things in fives. Golion, Mach Go Go Go, and so on.)

I didn't get what "five guys" was (allegedly) a reference to until I looked it up (and, as expected, made my day worse in so doing). It's entirely possible that somebody could know what Gamergate is but not remember details like how many people whatsisname said Zoe slept with. It does seem pretty specific.

Glad to see the official response. The 'Shuffle Gate: Exposed' line seemed weird to me because I was pretty on top of the original issue and didn't remember, nor could I find anything that was written in the fashion. However it's a pretty common with watergate exposes.

That said I still wasn't calling you all dumb for thinking it was related (as I am wont to do) because the five fun guys line even out of context is nail-on-head enough that even if it is a near direct translation it would still be a failure of localization for no one on the team to realize it. Very interested in seeing someone give a more literal translation to find out.

I still believe that the process of naming dumb, non-scandals in the $gate format is a coordinated conservative effort to make younger people think Watergate was a non-issue scandal about plumbing instead of the press uncovering US corruption at the highest levels. gatorGate seems to be an anomaly (in that it's a real social issue) until you realize that the term was coined by Jayne Cobb to discuss a dude's petulant, entitled whining about someone who didn't want to go out with them.

I think you've got it backwards: the right wing keeps putting "-gate" at the end of things because they really want to convince people that, say, Travelgate really was a dire, impeachable offense.

They've been trying to nail the Clintons as murder-their-friends-and-make-it-look-like-suicide corrupt for 25 years. Their goal is absolutely not to make us think every accusation against Hillary Clinton is a partisan hissy-fit; that's the result, but it's not the intention.

Compelling, plausible.But it feels like the closest thing the right has had to a legit scandal was the administration's handling of Benghazi, and that didn't get a "-gate". I can't imagine a compelling "-gate" was not found for this or any other talking point nonsense. So I'm forced to conclude that this was a deliberate choice not to make it a "-gate" scandal.

Maybe I'm putting the "-gate" before the "water" here.Maybe it seems more legit because it didn't get hit with a stupid name?

The -gate thing feels like it grew out of a pithy pun on the Whitewater scandal; using the portmanteau 'Whitewatergate' evoked the earlier incident. Then people kept using -gate as a suffix after that without any particular rhyme or reason beyond as an indicator of scandal.